After a number of complaints about the Photos app redesign in iOS 18, Apple is tweaking the look and feel of the app in its new OS release, now branded as iOS 26.
The change was briefly mentioned Monday during the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25); Apple noted it was bringing back a tabbed interface to Photos, though it won’t look the same as before.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, stated, “Many of you missed utilizing tabs in the Photos app.” This is the closest Apple will ever come to acknowledging that it made a mistake with the app’s redesign last year. As he demonstrated the upgrade, he continued, “Photos now contains separate tabs for Library and for Collections.”
You may search your whole library and locate your albums and favorites under Collections.
A user interface that many users obviously prefer is the Library tab, which makes it simpler to look through recent photos.
Because iOS 18’s modifications to Photos consolidated all of your photo organization and interaction options onto a single page, there was some opposition. Some developers even took advantage of the criticism by releasing third-party picture apps that claimed to restore the previous UI in exchange for money.
The Photos app can now convert your 2D images into 3D spatial images thanks to the iOS 26 upgrade. This functionality, which was inspired by Apple’s Vision Pro spatial computing headset, is available on the iPhone’s redesigned Lock Screen.
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